Mars and Jupiter 20140414

[GlassWalker 99]

-

First time doing planetary in... a very long time. I kinda gave up a year ago when I realised my SCT was out of collimation. Adjusting it with the standard screws wasn't fun, so I replaced them with Bob's Knobs. And there it sat, uncollimated until tonight. Well, it still isn't properly collimated, just a bit less so with a rough 5 minute fiddle.

Anyway, the Mars shot was taken with an old 8" Meade SCT, and the Jupiter was me playing with the Tal 125 RS to see how that compares. Both with a Bresser SA-barlow 3x and DFK21AU618. Preprocessing with PIPP as for some reason files from my Win8 laptop I'm using now aren't readable with AS!2 on my desktop unless I go through some intermediate format, but it had no trouble with the same files generated by my Win7 laptop. Stacking with AS!2.

I really need to get the SCT collimated properly some time... still, I'm quite excited at my first go at Mars.

Edited April 14, 2014 by GlassWalker

[JamesF 18,001]

I reckon you could probably try an RGB Align in Registax just to correct the atmospheric dispersion and squeeze a bit more out of those images.

Good efforts though, after a long break.  I find it a struggle getting back into it after only a few weeks off.

James

[Pete Presland 11,373]

a couple of very repsectable images, agree with the  RGB Align it should help a little  but a good restart!

[GlassWalker 99]

Dispersion! Why didn't I think of that. I assumed I did a "could do better" job of the collimation, or perhaps the optical chain wasn't as straight as it could be. Mars was low down, but Jupiter was higher up and still affected though.

I've not tried that function in Registax before, so will have a play with that later.

[JamesF 18,001]

The easiest approach is to open the dialogue box for that function, draw the box out to cover the entire target and hit "estimate".  It's rarely too far out that way and if it isn't quite perfect it gives you a good place from which to start tweaking.

James

[riklaunim 535]

Atmospheric dispersion can change with weather, and sometimes it may be much stronger than usual. Collimation doesn't split colors

[GlassWalker 99]

Collimation on a refractor could give funky colours, couldn't it? I did wonder if I was *that* good I could make a mirror system do it too! Well, it does have the corrector plate...

Had a very quick play, seems to work, but I can't remember which was the "best" output of various attempted I had last night so use it on...

[Virgoman 599]

You have some good detail coming through on those images. Certainly an RGB align  as suggested by James & Pete should be beneficial.

                                                               Best regards,

                                                                                      Ralph